It’s Toasted: Modernity and “Downton Abbey”

“Is it not enough that we are sheltering a dangerous revolutionary, Mrs. Hughes? Could you not have spared me that?” asks Carson, the butler, midway through last night’s episode of “Downton Abbey.” That is not the mention of the word prostitute at Downton, the Earl’s middle daughter being jilted at the altar, or even the revolutionary Branson appearing at dinner in his daytime suit. That is an electric toaster, a pincher model according to the Cyber Toaster Museum, with a nickel-plated toast rack on top. “I’ve given it to myself as a treat,” says Mrs. Hughes, the housekeeper, placidly. “If it’s any good, I’m going to suggest getting one for the upstairs breakfasts.”

Carson’s equivalence comes to seem apt, however, when you consider the toaster as a piece of technological comic relief inserted into an episode bursting with new, even revolutionary themes. If the first two episodes of the third season of “Downton Abbey” felt like we were going in circles—wedding, wedding, inheritance—Episode 3 introduces some futuristic motors for the plot. Estate management and modern medicine, suitable jobs for women and what’s to become of the children, all of these will be explored both upstairs and downstairs.

As executive producer Gareth Neame recently told KCRW’s Frances Anderton, he and creator Julian Fellows chose 1912 as the start date for the series because it was the beginning of the modern technological era. And indeed, every season has inserted some piece of technology into the plot, and into the house, modernizing Downton despite itself. In the first season that was the “glare” of the electric chandelier, and the mysterious typewriter that was to provide the housemaid Gwen with a livelihood out of service. In the second, it was the telephone, with its “banshee” ring and useful ability to speed the narrative.

Now, in 1921, there is the toaster, already a decade old in terms of technology. (When the episode was shown in Britain, the toaster even got its own Tumblr.) Scrolling through online histories of toasters, one learns that they don’t reach the level of ornament proper to a noble house until circa 1920. That’s when the toaster shifts from a wiry utilitarian object of the kitchen to something that might be seen on a middle-class breakfast table. And the breakfast table at Downton is a battleground.

A set of four scenes establish the new themes with great economy. First we have Lord Grantham and Matthew Crawley, after dinner, discussing his new role at Downton. “Am I to answer to you both?” Carson asks, his intonation on both similar to the later that. Matthew waves him off. “I have made an investment in the estate. Nothing else will change.” But less than a minute later, when Carson asks after his long-pending second footman, Matthew can’t help but raise a middle-class objection. (Remember all that Season One bother about whether he would or would not accept a valet?) “I sometimes feel the world is rather different than it was before the war …” he muses, only to be cut off and contravened by Lord Grantham. Dishy footman, here we come.

Yet, that “before the war” hangs in the air as he asks Edith, in the next scene, “Why don’t you have breakfast in bed?” “Because I’m not married,” she answers. She’s the only woman at the breakfast table, her mother and sisters upstairs in bed, soon to be served electric toast. She literally has nothing to do. Her father, hogging the paper, is kind enough to offer this tidbit of news: Tennessee is going to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment. In America, all women can vote. “More than I can say,” drawls Edith. “You should write to the Times,” says Matthew. “Go and ask your mother if she needs any help with the dinner,” says Lord Crawley, ending the discussion.

It is no accident that it’s the women who seem to be the chief users and beneficiaries of each new technology. Gwen types, Mrs. Hughes toasts, Edith decides that if she can’t read her own newspaper, she might as well write for it. We see our pet conservatives, Lord Grantham, Carson, Lady Mary, Alfred the footman, trying to deny the passage of time. But for the Ediths of the world, a change of company at breakfast can’t come soon enough. As the Dowager Countess says, in words my mother definitely uttered during my own whiny adolescence, “There must be something you can put your mind to!” During the war, Lady Edith and Lady Sybil found much to do. Now they are reduced to sighing and supporting. In the same interview on KCRW, Neame says, “Women had no function except to change outfits…They would change five or six times a day, and they needed maids to get their clothes ready. They employed an army of people to help them.”

In offhand remarks and blunt statements, this season marks the beginning of the argument that the aristocratic estate is essentially a one-industry town. If the first season of “Downton Abbey” was about falling in love with a house, Season 3 is about keeping that house not just through deus ex machina inheritances, but through spread-sheets and earnings reports. “I feel a duty to do what I can,” says Matthew. Is the hiring of a second footman a public obligation? Can you fire an old farmer? Or should they really move to Downton Place, and do without a valet? Branson articulates the democratic side most bluntly: “When I see these houses, I don’t see charm and grace. I see something horrible.” At Downton, it’s the dawn of managerial revolution, aristocrat-style.